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Personal transporter

Ridable small motorised road vehicles

  • 5 min read
  • 5 chapters

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Generally excluded from this legal category are electric bicycles (that are considered to be a type of bicycle); electric motorbikes and scooters (that are treated as a type of motorcycle or moped); and powered mobility aids with 3 or 4 wheels on which the rider sits (which fall within regulations covering powered mobility scooters).

History

The first personal transporter was the Autoped, a stand-up scooter with a gasoline engine made from 1915 to 1922. Engine-powered scooters and skateboards reappeared in the 1970s and the 1980s. Twike and Sinclair C5 were 1980s enclosed hybrid velomobiles that also used pedal power.

With the rapid improvements in lithium batteries in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a range of new types of personal transporters appeared, and began to spread into use in urban settings for both recreation and practical transportation.

Dean Kamen applied for his first patent for a 'human transporter', the Segway PT, in 1994. This was followed by other patent applications prior to its product launch in late 2001 and first deliveries to customers early in 2002.

Trevor Blackwell demonstrated a self-balancing unicycle based on the control-mechanism from a Segway PT in 2004 for which he published open source designs (see Eunicycle). Focus Designs released the first commercially available self-balancing unicycle (which had a seat) in 2008 and in 2010 Shane Chen, an American businessman and founder of Inventist, filed a patent for the more familiar and compact seatless device which his company, Inventis launched in 2011.

Chen then went on to file a patent for a self-balancing scooter in February 2013, and launched a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign in May 2013 with multiple companies, mainly in China releasing similar products. 500,000 units from 10 suppliers were recalled from the US market alone in July 2016.

Louie Finkle of California is credited with creating the first commercial electric skateboards, offering his first wireless electric skateboard in 1997 and he filed for a patent in April 1999, though it was not until 2004 that electric motors and batteries had sufficient torque and efficiency to power boards effectively. In 2012 ZBoard raised nearly 30 times their target for a balance controlled electric skateboard on Kickstarter, which was well received at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2013.

In December 2016 The Verge magazine suggested that 2017 would be an "important year" for personal electric vehicles of all sizes. On 14 August 2018, a unicycle manufactured by InMotion caught fire in a British flat. About 1 week later, InMotion issued a statement to discourage customers from buying parallel imports. From 1 July 2019 onwards, Singapore enforces the fire safety standard known as "UL 2272" by banning the sales of non-certified products, and by publishing a list of legal products.

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